Getting Ahead Of Myself; or, What Happens When A Story Really Comes To Life

(Brought to you by the "Better Late Than Never" department, since turkey coma took over my brain last night...)

Well, my NaNoWriMo project is currently sitting at roughly 61,000 words, and I'm not quite halfway into the story. Which means that this one, like last year's, is probably going to run a lot longer than it should.

I'm not terribly worried about it at this point, because I can already see lots of places where the story can be trimmed and condensed. There's a lot of what I've seen referred to as "tea drinking" in it. By that, I mean the stretches of story where the characters are drinking tea, and we get the excruciating details of how each takes his/her tea, and how many times they stir it, and how many sips they take of it, and so on. While a certain amount of that is necessary to help flesh out a story's world, too much of it can really bog down a narrative. So that's something I'm definitely going to keep in mind come the editing phase.

The story is also set in the Victorian era, so a lot of the descriptions and conversations are far more wordy than they really need to be. But my goal for this draft is to get down all of the images and nuances that are essential to how I want to tell the story; I can go back later and pare out a lot of the excess verbiage while still (hopefully) keeping in the flavor of the era.

I can see that there's a lot of repetition in it, too. There are three separate places, for instance, where my MC's father thinks about or discusses her relationship with The Love Interest. I'm pretty sure I can lose at least one of them, and I can shorten up one or both of the others (though frankly, I'm very pleased with the scene where The Father confronts The Love Interest directly and don't want to pare it down too much).

Finally, I can look back at what I've written so far and identify a lot of stuff that is really part of the backstory/worldbuilding phase that I, as the author, need to know about, but that you, as the reader, really don't, or at least not in quite so much detail. I can trim that out pretty easily, I think, and it will make for a better story that way.

But what pleases me most of all is that this story finally seems to have found its voice. (I know, a mere 60K words in!) The characters are beginning to come alive for me at last, and the tone is finally starting to even out. I have a fair idea of the arc for the rest of this book. I know where I want to go, and I mostly know how I want to get there. There are still a few fuzzy plot patches, but that's really not a bad thing. Discovering what goes in them will help keep the project fresh and alive for me.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that, in the shower* yesterday morning, I got a very clear vision of where the rest of this trilogy (yes, trilogy) is headed. In particular, a number of the plot points for Book Three have become clear to me, and one scene in particular presented itself to me almost fully-formed.

Now I'm in a quandary. I really don't want to lose momentum on my current story, but on the other hand, I want to make sure to capture these ideas while they are still fresh in my head. I'm not sure how to handle this, though at the moment I'm leaning toward making Book Three wait until December 1, at least. Then I'll take a day or two to jot down outlines and notes for what I want to make sure to do when I get there before I go back and finish the current story.

How do other people handle it when a story wants to run away with you? Do you run off after the plot bunnies, or do you make them wait their turns?


* Have I mentioned that many of my best story ideas come to me in the shower? Why is that, I wonder?

Consulting The Oracle, or How I Decide What To Write Next

As we've mentioned several times in the last week, November is rapidly approaching, and with it, NaNoWriMo. One of the most pertinent and troubling questions in my mind these past few weeks has been, "What shall I write this year?"

At last count, my Ideas And Works In Progress list had 34 different ideas on it. Any one of them could prove to be entertaining. But I've discovered that with NaNoWriMo, one of the key success factors for me is picking a story that really wants to be written -- one where I have a fair idea of the characters and at least some of the key plot points, and most importantly, one I'm passionate about.

So, okay. I went through the list and managed, with great difficulty, to narrow it down to the seven about which I was most passionate this month. The problem was that I liked them all, and wanted to write them all next. Obviously, that was not going to work, so I consulted The Oracle.

No, not the one at Delphi.

In this case, I refer to my friends list on LiveJournal as "The Oracle". They helped me pick my first NaNo project, and that mostly worked out okay. (Well, except the part where the beginning needs a bit of re-working.) So I was willing to return to them for advice this time around.

The overwhelming majority selected this one:

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Story Title: The Daughters of August Winterbourne

Genre: Victorian/Steampunk Fantasy

Quick Synopsis: Celia Winterborne is anxious to prove herself as one of the first female students admitted to the Royal Academy. But when her airship-designer father is kidnapped by the evil Tarmanian Empire, she and the half-sisters she never knew she had must join forces to fly to his rescue.

Description: Celia Winterbourne wants nothing more than to go to the Royal Academy and study airship design, like her famous father August Winterbourne. And this year, for the first time, the Academy is admitting females into its hallowed halls -- five of them.

Celia applies and is accepted; for her it is a dream come true. At least, it is until she meets the four other finalists ... who are also daughters of August Winterbourne. It seems Papa had an eventful final term at the Academy...

But when Papa is abducted by Tarmanian forces trying to build an airship program of their own, only the five daughters together have the information needed to complete his latest project and fly to his rescue.
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So I have no doubt that you'll be hearing more about this project as November progresses.

However, outside of NaNoWriMo, I was looking for another project. You'll recall that I blogged last week about creating a Web site for myself? Well, one of the ideas I had was to create an ongoing story that could be posted as a serial to the Web site, to build readership and give people a reason to keep coming back. However, none of my existing ideas seemed quite right for this project. I wanted to do ... well ... something with dragons in it. But nothing was springing to mind.

Or rather, nothing did until Wednesday evening, when I was showering before bed. (I get a lot of my best writing ideas in the shower. Not in the bath, mind you, but specifically in the shower. My water bill will likely go up next month thanks to NaNoWriMo.) Then a plot bunny up and bit me, and presented me with a universe to write in, and no fewer than four ideas to set in it. I picked the one that engaged my passion the most, and before I knew it, I had written almost 2,000 words on it. (My goal is to have the Web site up and running before November, and I will have a short synopsis of the new story posted there, but will probably wait until after NaNoWriMo is over to begin posting the serial.)

So the answer to the question is: Sometimes I do a bit of market research, and sometimes I just go where my passions lead me.

How do other people decide?